Chapter VI.
THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP.
“We are members one of another.”—St. Paul.
“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do on earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them; and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.
“Therefore I bid you not to dwell in hell but in heaven; or while ye must, upon earth, which is part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part.”—William Morris, The Dream of John Ball.”
“Sans d’égalité donc, point d’unité; sans liberté point d’égalité; mais point de liberté non plus sans des devoirs mutuels volontairement accomplis, c’est-a-dire accomplis par la volonté se portant d’elle-même et sans contrainte a tout ce qui produit l’union entre les êtres égaux; autrement chacun n’aurait d’autre règle que son intérêt, sa passion. Et du conflit de tant de passions, de tant d’intérêts opposés naîtraient aussitôt, avec la guerre, la servitude et la tyrannie. Or, l’obéissance libre au devoir est une obéissance d’amour; liberté lorsque l’amour s’affaiblit, la liberté décline même proportion. A la place de l’union volontaire et morale, dont il est le principle, la force, loi des brutes, opére une union purement matérielle.”—Lamennais, Affaires de Rome.
IT is usually assumed that the distinctively social end of life begins “after business hours.” There is, we say, “no room for sentiment in business,”—which is part of the intolerable price we pay for our subjection to the economic motive. In business the presumption is that we are all competitors; when business is over we are prepared to be friends. The formality and the insincerity of much social intercourse in our time—not to speak of its utter fruitlessness for any healthy human good—has its origins largely in the banishment of fellowship from the “business end” of life. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of wholesome human intercourse in modern life or that there are not genuine friendships between business competitors and between principals and subordinates in industry; but it is generally true that we conceive of commerce and industry as admitting of no extensive exercise of the humanities; and for this habit of mind we are punished by a deep impoverishment of life.
There is a sense in which the struggle for liberty may be regarded as being essentially a struggle to broaden the basis of human fellowship; and it is undoubtedly true that forms of privilege are the most prolific causes of social schism. No community possesses the conditions of real fellowship while it is (as modern communities are) divided into topdogs and underdogs, whether the topdogs be aristocrats or plutocrats, and the underdogs be serfs or wage-slaves. For the poison of privilege is apt to permeate the whole body; and an exploited class may itself be composed of exploiters. In our day the quest and the possession of pecuniary advantage has so grievously muddied the springs of fellowship that we live in a chronic temper of mutual suspicion and distrust. We do not constitute living societies; we are but collections of individuals who live together because we must, and come no nearer to each other than is necessary for the indispensable common operations of life. Lord Morley has pointed out that the business of the Irish Land League lay as much in adjusting feuds among its own members as in carrying on their common feud against the landlords. Within small circles there is, of course, much genuine friendly exchange and co-operation; there are holiday occasions when good temper and good fellowship rule; but for the rest, we chiefly live under jungle law.
It is essential to the creation of a living society that we should recognise that the principle of fellowship is a condition of the highest fruitfulness of human effort in every part of life. But fellowship in this connection means something more than the casual and superficial camaraderie of one’s leisure hours. It must be translated into concrete policies and into organised and sustained co-operation. In this sense its application to industry is one of the first conditions of its restoration in other regions and in other senses. Indeed, it may be regarded as the natural complement of that change in the worker’s status which we have seen to be impending. Free men will flow into fellowship as the cistern to the river; and the “democratic control” of industry is the name we give to the practice of fellowship in industry which is the clear sequel to the doctrine of partnership.
Mr. Sidney Webb, as we have seen, advocates the grant of a “constitution” to industry; but this proposal suffers from the inherent defect of the well-meaning experiments in co-partnership and profit-sharing of which there have been not a few in recent years. This defect is that all alike preserve the line of privilege. The benefits are granted as concessions from above; and generally as incentives to greater assiduity. There can be no objection to the granting of concessions from above so long as those who are above come down and stand on the same footing as those below. But so long as a vestige of the old differentiation of superior and inferior, of master and servant remains, not all the nominal co-partnership and profit-sharing in the world can satisfy the conditions of real partnership. While for instance the administrative and executive branches of an industry remain out of the sphere of co-partnership, the partnership is a polite fiction; and it is only by the passing of all the departments of an industry, administrative as well as operative, into the control of all who carry them on, that democratic conditions can be established. The theory of partnership implies an actual interest in and an actual control over all the divisions of an industry; and, while this does not imply that direction and leadership and the powers of discipline will not still be vested in individuals, these individuals will owe their position not to any antecedent privilege but to the will and consent of the workers as a whole.